If you can position sustainable solutions in people's self-interest and really make it clear to them how it improves what they want to do, whatever that is, it could be about style, could be about cost, it could be about speed, it could be about torque, but if the sustainable solution solves real problems for people that are high priority problems for them, then you're actually gonna make a lot of progress toward getting sustainability solutions into the mainstream.

So good day, conscious capitalist leaders and so on. We've got a very interesting guest here today. His name is Josh Dorfman and he's the founder and CEO of Supercool, a climate tech company reinventing cooling to dramatically reduce its impact on the planet. Josh is a longtime sustainability entrepreneur, author and former host of The Lazy Environmentalist. With Supercool, he's tackling one of the most overlooked drivers of global warming.

traditional refrigerants, what we all have at home. By building ultra-efficient climate friendly cooling solutions, he's a visionary leader helping business and technology move forward, a cooler and more sustainable future. Thank you, Josh, for joining us. It's great to meet you here today. And, and, and we look forward to hearing from you and your wisdom. thought I might kick it off and say.

Yeah, Supercool is re-imagining cooling from the ground up. What's the core innovation behind Supercool and how does it fundamentally differ from the traditional cooling technologies?

Well, that would be, I've talked to a number of companies doing that. It's not precisely what Supercool is. Supercool is really more of the, at a more higher level. Supercool has come out of a lot of innovation I've worked on for years around climate technology. Supercool is really the storytelling arm that's actually covering what happens across climate technology today.

So we talk with a number of companies. As a matter of fact, I just got back from a conference in Las Vegas with Schneider Electric, one of the largest global sustaining players in the world, looking at a lot of technologies around cooling, whether it's in data centers or elsewhere, but Supercool itself is a media company.

You've

led multiple ventures across the sustainable landscape. How has your entrepreneurial journey shaped your approach to building climate solutions that are both scalable and commercially compelling?

Well, I got my, well, my start, I say, I suppose I had my, my environmental epiphany, if you will, about 30 years ago, living and working in China in the mid 1990s. I had gone over there as a young university graduate to think about a career, pursuing a career in perhaps the state department, maybe the CIA. I didn't exactly know, but I figured, Hey, if I go to China in the 1990s.

cool stuff will probably happen and I think this is going to be a very important relationship in the 21st century as it turns out that was correct.

Reasons

that you thought of at the time, Well.

You never I mean in some respects what was in truth I feel like I've had two clear moments of insight into the future and that was the first and I felt a little bit fated to go to China Isn't Nixon had actually, know quote-unquote opened China on the day I was born February 21st 1972 and so as an international relations undergrad and interested in politics and thinking about the future of the world in history, you know it

the, it's my thesis on China when I was in university. And it just became clear to me that, that these were going to be, the U S and China would become rival powers. It was just, it seemed inevitable to me that that was the future that we would move into. And I felt like I know, me go spend some time there. So I was teaching on a university. I got a part-time job just to make a little extra cash, working in a factory that happened to make bicycle locks. Now at the time in China, a billion people rode bicycles. So I thought, all right, well this.

This is going to be very interesting. was very interesting. was for an American company called Kryptonite. And I ended up going to work for Kryptonite full time. We opened ⁓ more factories throughout the country. And over the course of that experience, two things happened. One, I thought, man, I actually really like business. This is really interesting and fascinating. And two, I realized that while there are a billion car bikes in China, there will one day be a billion cars.

And you could see the highways, tunnels, bridges, you know, all that coming into effect. so, so I thought, I don't know anything about global warming. don't know anything about climate change, but how are they, what are we going to do when there's a billion more cars on in China? And then you've got India and you've got Eastern Europe. Everyone's developing. Everybody wants this Western, know, higher standard of living, higher quality of life, which is what we're actually the idea we're exporting to the rest of the world. And now they're going to do it. What does that mean for, for the environment? And so I say that, you know, to your question.

When I think about the ventures that I would try and work on, in my mind, the idea is always we have to enable the entire, like the scale has to be so massive, right? To actually affect the change around sustainability that enables the billions of people on this planet to continue to pursue higher qualities of living, higher standards of living within the capabilities of the earth's ecosystems to sustain those higher standards of living for current generations.

and future generations, right? That's kind of like my whole definition of sustainability. That's really it. How do we live as well as we possibly can while enabling future generations to live as well as they possibly can within the finite resources that are available to all

And how did that journey into China, how did that sort of unfold in a way that was unintended or unexpected?

Well, I came back to the States and I decided to, that I was going to go to business school. But really when I came back to the States, nothing made sense to me. mean, I was a kid who I grew up playing sports. was good at sports. I went to an Ivy league school. I was a good student. And then I went to China and like, I was a high performance kid who kind of had a pretty clear idea about what, you know, what he, what I was going to do with my life.

And then I came back from China and started and came back home and I was like, wait a second. Now I'm thinking about this global warming thing. Like nothing in my life makes sense. I'm back in the States. don't really understand. Like I'm looking at my own culture through different eyes, having been away and in a developing part of the world in a totally different culture for two years. That was really hard. And so the unintended effect was that I became an environmental activist.

I would say going to protests, marches and rallies while I was also in business school getting an MBA. And so my friends would be like, dude, what are you doing? And I would be like, I have no idea what I'm doing. That's the problem. And I just got to a point where I, you know, I was getting exposed to all this information about, you know, how we're changing climate for the first time.

And it got to the point where I would come home to visit my family, my parents, my brother. And I remember my brother saying, great, he's home to make us all feel guilty again. And I just thought, gosh, I don't want to be that guy. Like I am miserable and making those I love miserable. I'm not really affecting change. I'm just like screaming into the wind about all these problems I see around the environment and climate. And I decided to do something about it. And it took a while, but the realization that I came to was.

Sort of saying like, look, I live in the US, we are a consumer driven economy. That's not going to change. Maybe what I can help change or influence is the way, is what we consume and how we consume. And can I move that in a more sustainable direction? Truth is, I like stuff. I grew up as a middle and then upper middle class kid in Westchester, New York, you know, like I come from this culture. I don't want to rail against this culture. How do I help move our culture in a more proactive.

direction in a way that works within the culture to try to affect change instead of being outside of it where I don't see a lot of change really being possible.

That's a noble quest, I'm sure. And it's funny when you talk about your experience in, the developing countries in the eighties and nineties, I traveled a lot. You know, growing up in Australia, your first stop is usually in Asia somewhere. So I used to travel those cities thinking how romantic it was because everyone was on bicycles. And that certainly influenced my cycling career in a positive way as well. But it's interesting what you say around how you recognize the culture that you come from.

You've learned something from being elsewhere. How do you incorporate that in a meaningful, in a meaningful way? So you want to talk a little bit about the successes or the challenges in doing that? ⁓

I mean, for sure. And it sounds like, Glenn, you've had similar experiences. mean, being in China at that age, you know, where you're still so open and you're in your early twenties, you're just absorbing, learning. I mean, it changed me in to my core, just having that experience. I loved it. It was profound, but I did come back a different person.

I came back, honestly, because I was in China and I, I came back and it's so, it is so crowded. mean, like I came back with a more love and appreciation for nature. think that I had that when I went that's, ⁓ and, and just really feeling more, I became very connected to this idea that I had been given a gift and the gift that I had been given when I was in China was seeing the future. Kind of like I said, sort of at the beginning, like I know how this country is going to develop.

I mean, not exactly, but I know there's going to be, this will be the biggest automobile market on the planet. There's no question. just, you can see how fast the development was happening and the commitment to that development. And so, you know, I came home, I got an MBA, I went to an international business school called Thunderbird. We'd work on cool projects like, hey, let's figure out how we sell more Colgate toothpaste in Saudi Arabia. And it's like, all right, well, that's interesting for 10 minutes. You know, it's sort of intellectually fun, but like, honestly, like who cares?

start working on retailing, merchandising, very modern design, very beautiful looking eco-friendly products. And I'm going to try and use some of these like design style levers to get consumers to try and move in a more sustainable direction. That evolved toward into a furniture company because certainly two decades ago across the U S and we had some international vendors too. There are all these amazing designers, but I feel like we're about my age in their late twenties, early thirties. Some certainly older who had been doing this.

at this for a while, but who there was like this movement forming in pockets of the US from Kansas City to Atlanta, of course, some of the bigger cities where I had all these designers were like, you know, they're like, we want sustainable stuff. We want stuff that aligns with our values about how we like, how we want to live. And we're not satisfied with, you know, a bunch of sticks and wrapping some like rope around it and putting some burlap over it and calling it a bench. Like we actually want like good stuff.

made from sustainable materials. And it was just, it was an incredible moment. was in the, something was in the zeitgeist. It was changing. And yeah, I felt like I was sort of the, the birth of like this new sort of modern approach to sustainability. And it was really fun to be, you know, involved, getting involved at that time.

And what was the next step after the retail venture?

Well, during the retail venture, my first employee on her last day working for me, so I had started that company in Washington, DC because I did skip a step here. I had gone into a PhD program at George Washington University in political science to study politics, China and the environment. And after about half a semester or maybe half a semester plus a month, I was sitting in a drafty, cold classroom.

on a Tuesday night reading a book from some professor about who rules the world. he was apparently brilliant, but I didn't understand it. And I just thought like, you know what? Like, I don't care who this guy thinks rules the world. And I don't really know what I'm doing in this PhD program. It was like the last place I had to be to like think through all this stuff, these disparate thoughts in my head. And I just thought, screw it, man. Like I said, I live in America, we're a consumer culture.

I'm going to go help consumers, you know, consume greener. I'm out of here. And I quit and started my company. And so was in DC and my first employee on her last day working for me, because I decided the following year to move up to Brooklyn to go get around, or a lot of these really great designers were emerging around sustainability. Her last day working for me in DC, she took that opportunity to ⁓ lay into me for just being, in her words, ⁓ a terrible environmentalist. She was like, okay.

Here we are, I've just spent a year with you. You know, like you launched this company. You're not my boss anymore. So I'm gonna tell you exactly how I feel about you. You, you're always in the shower. You barely recycle. You're gonna throw your bed out. I take it to the homeless shelter. You like, suck dude. Like, are you even an environmentalist? Like, what?

So

she kept the scorecard, she kept a kept a one year scorecard and presented that to you as an exit interview.

Yeah, Glenn, it pretty much, mean, was worse, honestly was worse than that.

But it's a magic moment, isn't it? I mean, it sounded like it was a bit awkward at the time, but you seem to have converted that into a more positive outcomes for all.

It was extremely, it got actually even more awkward, but I'll just leave it at that. And it was, it definitely was this like truth bomb. And I felt that as some of this probably comes up in your world a lot, but I felt as someone running a values based company, I had an obligation to our audience, our customers, our stakeholders, whomever, to be really transparent about what we do well and what we don't do quite as well around our value. And so I owned it. So I wrote a blog.

and I called it the lazy environmentalist. I was like, it is true. I take really long showers. I do my best thing in the shower. I would love a low flow shower head with great pressure. If it had great pressure, most of them don't, but if it did, I'd buy it, right? And I want an Audi TT convertible. If it was electric or biodiesel or hydrogen or whatever, I don't really care about the technology, but if it were aligned with my values, it's what I want, I'll do it. But I'm probably not going to change my behavior just to do right by the planet. I'm not proud of that.

actually, I'm also not really ashamed of it, it's just the reality. I care but I'm lazy, I'm a lazy environmentalist and that struck a nerve. A radio producer somehow read my blog 20 years ago, found this little blog on my furniture site and called me up and was like, hey, this is cool, do you want to turn this into a radio show? I thought, yeah, I don't have any marketing budget, of course. He's like, well, no, you're gonna pay for it but I'll give you airtime. was like, okay, well, let's give it a shot.

I did, and we called it the Lazy Environmentalist. And then I got a break and it went to Sirius Sallet Radio, which was headquartered in New York. And so I started doing a weekly show and then the following year it went live every day on Sirius XM. And so now we're broadcasting across North America. And then it got turned into a reality TV show that I had for two years on Robert Redford's channel, Sundance channel, and was quite a journey. So helping lazy Americans go green without working very hard. Well.

You know, I love the, the cultural sort of appropriation of that, because like you said, if you can, you can have these higher moral grounds, but if it doesn't resonate with your community, it's not going to go anywhere. So the, the fact that you've been honest about the lazy side of it, I think is admirable. What did you learn through that journey and where is that? How has that affected your trajectory from here on?

Well, there were some core insights, I think that were reinforced through that journey. remember when we went, I think it was when we went live every day. And so I was bringing on guests and searching for guests and, and, you know, producing the show, hosting the show. I wanted to do a show around eco-friendly cars and transportation. think we had someone on from Toyota that was expected, talked about the Prius or something like that. But then I found this guy, Plasma Boy.

John Whelan, AKA Plasma Boy, who was a, ⁓ a drag racer, ⁓ know, race car driver in Portland, Oregon. And what John had done was he had taken, I mean, I guess you could say borrowed a lot of batteries from giant forklifts in the warehouse where he worked and shoved them in the back of a tiny, tiny little,

little dot like white dots in which he called the white zombie. So you had all of this battery power in a tiny little car and he brought it out to the Portland International Speedway. He started winning all these races with this electric car. And so I got him on the radio show and I got his engineer on the radio show and they're yacking it up and he's like, Josh, you wouldn't believe it. Last, you know, last Friday night I was at the racetrack. I blew the doors off this Corvette, you know, zero to 60 in under three seconds, 800 pounds of torque.

American made energy is like, and then I went up to the driver afterward and I was like, how do feel about the fact that I just kicked your butt with a car running on American made energy? I used to know like imported oil. And, and then he's talking about the tech specs. So we had this little radio show, you know, but it was broadcast live and, and, and in, the States, it's usually, you know, people in their trucks who are listening to satellite radio, right? So we get all these people starting to call in and they're talking to John and they're like,

Dude, that's insane, I wanna get that from my pickup truck, how'd you do it? Da-da-da, and they're having this conversation, all these truck drivers are calling in, they're having this great conversation. And what I realized in that moment, or what I felt, was that wow, all these people are so excited about this green solution, electric cars. None of the people calling in and having this really exciting conversation about this green solution are environmentalists, right, at all. And so the insight for me, and this has been the through line for the rest of my career was,

If you can position sustainable solutions in people's self-interest and really make it clear to them how it improves what they want to do, whatever that is, it could be about style, it could be about cost, it could be about speed, it could be about torque, it could be about profits, it could be about course cutting. But if the sustainable solution solves real problems for people that are high priority problems for them, then you're actually going to make a lot of progress toward getting sustainability solutions into the mainstream.

And that's always what I've set out to do since then.

That's

a really good story of rapid adoption and winning a drag race will certainly carry some emotional charge to do that. But transposing that into the commercial reality of the American auto industry. China, who you mentioned earlier, have clearly been more successful in that. And some would argue that central controls have certain benefits above that. But it's interesting in the last year or two, how

Divergent the, the U S, ⁓ auto market has become from the Chinese model. Any, any thoughts on, that as a trend?

That is, well, I think there's two ways to look at it in my view as sitting here in the States. From a sustainability perspective, who cares? If there's going to be more EVs on the road, if they're coming out of China, they're coming out of the US, who cares? That's what you need is more EVs on the road. an American national interest, I think that clearly is a huge challenge to the US.

central command, just as you pointed out, we're going to flow all this money into this. We're going to allow hundreds of car manufacturers to exist. And most of them in the end are going to disappear because clearly the market can't support hundreds of automobile manufacturers that will be winners. And we, China, the central communist party, remember we're okay with that, right? Like let's, let's end by the way, like, and we're going to make sure that like our people are buying them too. We're going to do what we can to move this market. But I think, you know,

Okay. So separate out those dynamics. What you also start to hear about are development cycles that are at least twice as fast to get a new automobile on the road than you can in the U S or Europe. And that's not about cutting corners. That's not about saying, we're not going to do as much safety testing, maybe a little bit, but it's really also about how do you speed up design cycles? How do you just move so much faster? And so there's so much innovation there that I think the rest of the world and it's not, I mean, I've heard Jim Farley, the CEO for talk about this.

And he drives a, or he flew over at a Chinese SUV and he's like, this is the best car I've ever driven. Like it's incredible. So, you know, as just a, as a human, I find it all fascinating as an American, you know, my self, you know, national, our national interest. I don't know. I'm a big fan, you know, like, look, we, in my mind, and again, this is kind of why I was in China 30 years ago, America exported the whole idea of.

globalization, raise your standards of living, participate in our Western capitalist model and you'll raise your standards of living, you'll raise your quality of life, we wanna help you do that. And then some countries got really good at it and we were like, wait a second, time out, but now we're not happy about it, right, now we're not happy about what happened over there in China, like. And it's like, come on, man, you know, this is, we told, this is what we wanted everyone to do, they just caught up and they're doing it really well and now we have a problem with it.

And so I find that a little bit hypocritical.

I like the way you described this sort of tension between the consumer markets and sustainability, just by the way they're structured. I'm wondering if you can share any insight into the kind of storytelling narratives that are getting traction within the sort of mass market at the moment. Cause they seem to be, there seems to be sort of a conflict between those two worlds and never shall they meet. But I'd love to hear from you on some examples that have been successful.

Well, I think we're in this new moment where there are all of these solutions that are now commercially deployed. And so I would argue climate solutions now commercially deployed that are not readily known, understood in the broader kind of cultural conversation. ⁓ And not just in the US, around the world, but let's say also, but let's say in this case, specific to the US.

That's why we started, actually, that's why we started Supercool. But the way I got to Supercool was four years ago, I had started, or four five years ago, I had started a, second sustainable furniture company. This company called Simbly, like Simple Assembly. And it was sort and it was like Ikea style, at-pack, knock-down furniture. I felt with a more elevated aesthetic, know, aesthetic subjective. I had a really good designer. We were manufacturing in North Carolina, the former

furniture manufacturing, certainly of the United States and one of them around the world. And the, the pandemic hit, this was good for a minute because people were buying desks and stuff that we were selling, but then our factory got shut down and then our materials became really shoddy when I could get them. I kept thinking more and more about materials and I kept thinking, okay, here we are. I'm trying to build the most sustainable furniture company. know how to build. I'm using this forest stewardship council certified wood. It's this plywood. It's beautiful, but.

In this moment, when I had some downtime, I just kept thinking, really is the best possible, most sustainable material we know how to make furniture with, or that's durable. Really is it still about cutting down trees? Like how can that be? There has to be something better. So I was wrestling with this idea and I got introduced at that moment to another, a guy who had moved to North Carolina. I didn't realize it, but had moved from LA. This guy Wada.

And so someone I knew said, Hey, there's this guy down on the other side of the state in Durham. You should talk to him. He's got a little furniture thing going too. Well, I took a look at Wada's website and it was complete trash, like from the AOL era. I'm a very, you may have gathered kind of aesthetically driven design person. So I was like, well, I don't need to talk to this, you know, I don't need to talk to this guy. But Wada is very persistent. And so we got on the phone and.

He's excited. He's like, you're build this big sustainable company. And I was just like, no, man, forget it. Like it's total waste of time. He's like, wow. I'm like materials. And he's like, well, what's wrong though? I'm like, I said the same thing to him. said to you, And then he said, well, what would you use? And I said, well, I don't know. Maybe like hemp, there's bamboo. There's gotta be something that's like, we can figure out. And so I didn't know this guy at all. And then Wada says, well, that's so interesting. Cause I have six giant trash bags of hemp in my garage. And then I said, well, hold on. Okay. What, who are you? Like, where are from? What's up?

And he says, well, I just moved here. spent eight years at SpaceX in Los Angeles. I was in charge of the life support systems, keeping astronauts alive on the Dragon spacecraft. And I said, wait, and you moved to Raleigh, North Carolina? What? And so anyway, you know, he had a whole story behind it, but I was like, look, here's what we should do, man. I'm going to shut my company. I think you should shut your company. We should go work on a materials company because also four years ago, Elon Musk was already talking about carbon removal basically, and actually put up $50 million for

this called XPRIZE to see could you scale solutions for carbon removal? And had also said, and so you had all these engineers at SpaceX who understood from this Elon perspective, there's simply not enough, the physics of like don't work. There's not enough land to grow enough trees to meaningfully pull enough carbon from the atmosphere in the time scale that we need it removed from the atmosphere. A lot of people don't want to hear that, but there is a logical engineering, the math doesn't pencil.

And so we said, okay, what if we could grow something that grows faster than trees that we could make that was durable that we could actually like turn into something and build a business. And so we did. We actually got more SpaceXers somehow to leave Los Angeles and fly to North Carolina. We took over a American spirit tobacco cigarette factory just North of Raleigh Durham, this tiny little town called Oxford, North Carolina, like a historic traditional.

tobacco growing cigarette manufacturing hub. And we identified this grass that grows 10 times faster than trees. North Carolina was testing it. The department of agriculture was testing it as a potential replacement for corn in ethanol because it grew so fast. And so they had some left. That whole project had failed, but they had some left. We got it today. And so this kind of goes to the storytelling thing. So today, you know,

planted, so this company I saw was the co-founding CEO, ran it for the first three years, grows this grass, again, 10 times faster than trees. We actually have tobacco farmers growing it. We tissue culture it. We have our own greenhouse labs. And then we turn it into those four foot by eight foot structural panels that you nail to the two by fours when you build a house. We built our own production technology that has, it's all electric. There's no smoke stack on our building. So we pulled all this carbon down in this grass. We slice it extremely thin.

So, and it retains a structure. So we outcompete lumber, we outcompete wood. And then we have like a very small machine where we took a massive mill and shrunk it down so it can fit in any warehouse. You plug it in and about 120 feet later, out comes these panels. And we got the largest home builder in America, DR Horton. Well, they came in early. They've been a partner, they've been an investor, and they gave us an order for 10 million of these panels, which will take some time to fulfill because that's almost a hundred thousand houses.

It's a lot of grass.

It's a lot of grass, man, but it's baked. And so I know it's a long-winded story, but the key to making this work is that this panel has to be exactly the same as what it replaces, the wood panel. And so of course, same dimension, same weight, but same density. So you can put a nail through it in the exact same way. And so the person on the job site has no idea that they're building a house out of grass instead of trees.

And all of that comes back to this kind of innovation storytelling that I see today where so many companies have figured out that, you know, that if you're going to go push climate solutions into the mainstream and get them out of their niche, they have to, like, there cannot be any alternative building technique. You cannot ask anyone to do anything differently. You can't ask anyone to pay more. You have to have drop-in solutions that work. That is the story that is unfolding.

across every industry today with climate solutions. And the companies that are doing are getting very good at telling that story to their customers. It's just not a story that we're telling quite broadly as a culture and society yet.

Yeah, I love the way that you identified value in various parts of the customer journey there. ⁓ and I think that's a challenge. I was in Venice a couple of weeks ago and went to the architectural Biennale and the theme there was climate change. What are we doing about it as a, as a profession and some of the solutions. And this is a global theater and some of the solutions were very elegant by the use of 3D printing.

a whole range of organic materials and then, you know, layering that on AI and other sort of tech stacks was, was really enlightening. And a lot of these solutions are yet to hit the mainstream, but I'm sure they were where your grass panels were a few years ago in terms of, you know, development in the, in the consumer markets. you got any other stories that might give us some reason for optimism in terms of our ability to

adapt to climate change within any of your sort of operating areas.

So specifically in terms of adapting to climate change, because I do, if that's what you're asking about. Yes. Okay. So I ran, I sort of feel like I'm pulling things out of the grab bag here, but I actually was the CEO of a center for climate adaptation and resilience. The first innovation center in America was called the Collider. This was in, it also happens to be in Western North Carolina in Asheville. And in this tiny town of Asheville, which is a hip, cool town, you know, great.

We have to put this somewhere where certainly no one's going to go looking for it. And we're in a cold war with the Soviet Union. So should something happen, you know, we'll just tug it away up in the mountains of North Carolina. And it's still within a day's train ride from the nation's capital. So what grew up around that data was this whole ecosystem of now Nobel Prize winning climate scientists ⁓ and an ecosystem of companies thinking about.

How do you use that data around analytics to help cities and companies and countries understand their risk and exposure to a changing climate and then what to do about it. So it's actually became the headquarters for ⁓ National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration for NOAA's data arm. And around that data, then an incredible, amazing guy, philanthropist in Western North Carolina, Mac Pearsall, decided to help spin up a center called The Collider where we would...

called Pearl Holmes, this entrepreneur, Marshall Go buddy, developed, put this development right on the Gulf coast of Florida where people want to live, but where you can, very hard to even get insurance these days because of all the storms coming through and climate related and then what have you, where he built a development, zero, I mean, stuff's I'm sure happening in Australia all the time, but solar, batteries, nobody pays an electric bill, reinforced, elevated.

Insurance is no problem. And he built this kind of lifestyle amenity that says we're right on the coast. You can have your boat. This can withstand category five hurricanes. This is how you build for the future to have you retain that quality. So I've seen that side. But what I've seen that was really exciting around the adaptation side. I feel like there are these technology platforms that are really giving cities insight into here's where you need to think about development. Here's how you, here's where you need to actually build. Here's where you need to not build. Here's where even like a city that's flat.

like Charleston, that's right on the coast, becoming a much, much bigger tourist destination, fast growing population, fast growing economy. Here, even in this, what you think is a flat geography, here's where you're going to have landslides. Here's where like the, here's, we can model all this out now. We have all the data and are really helping companies become much more sophisticated in terms of how they build. Sometimes on our platform with Supercool, we bring on mares to talk about what they're doing as well. have a conversation coming up with the mayor of Hoboken.

New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from New York City. That's about a quarter million people ⁓ city, the most dense cities in America. And they're doing a lot around permeability, right? So you have, if you have water flooding in, where does that water go? How do you design parks? How do you design other systems? Can you capture that water? Can you retain that water? Can you then re-utilize that water? How do you think about changing your infrastructure to accommodate a changing climate?

And so that, I get very hardened by those types of solutions and I see them all over the world. I mean, we had a conversation with the mayor, I'm blanking on his name, but the former mayor of Barranquilla, ⁓ Columbia, who has done a ton around replanting and mangroves and natural solutions, barriers around the city that help, you know, that can help absorb ⁓ ocean water if it's flooding in, just like getting just a whole next level of creativity that I think is.

Not always necessarily even high cost. It's just high consideration to adapt to a changing climate.

So where are you taking your many sort of interpretations of creativity? What, what's over the horizon for you in terms of how you can more effectively apply other design ideas or business ideas or a combination of both into getting more action.

Yeah, what I'm most excited about now, Glenn, is I'm kind of back in that storytelling phase. so every week I'm talking with mostly companies, but companies that the filter where I'm bringing companies onto, I mentioned early on, kind of on super cool. kind of, you we talked about Cooling or HVAC or what have you. Like I see now this next wave of companies that are really in this, this era of adoption in the marketplace. And then there's a really amazing.

kind of marketing agency called Antenna here in the U S and I think moving into Europe as well, where their CEO, I believe runs a podcast called the age of adoption. And it's really on this theme around this new moment we're in. And I think that's really the case. think that it's the, so what I'm trying to do is. Storytell and so bring on, I'll give you a concrete example. A couple of weeks ago, I talked to this guy, Paul Lambert. He's the CEO of a company called Quilt.

He spent years at Google, so he's obviously smart. ⁓ I think that's obvious. Maybe it's not obvious, but he's smart. so Quilt is, it's a heat pump home heating and cooling system. It's a ⁓ mini split system, right? So it's ductless. So you would put the mini splits in different parts of your house. This is the first system in the history of HVAC that now does what electric cars do. They're in, you know, they started, they're rolling out very fast. So maybe they're, I mean, they're

They're in a thousand plus homes. I mean, it's a young company, but they've got real attraction. They've only started a couple of years ago. They did the first ever over the air update of their heat pump mini split system so that their customers woke up the next day. Just like if you have a, you know, name your electric car, you get over the air updates like a Tesla, car actually gets new features, you know, in the morning. Their systems became 20 % more powerful, you know, overnight. Customers woke up, they had 20 % more powerful systems so they could have 20 % more heating and cooling.

And also the ability to still stay comfortable and heat and cool efficiently in a more extreme weather. If it got hotter, colder, the system would still be able to work. Right. So you now have, have all this technology, like every device in the house, every appliance is getting a brain and that brain drives massive, massive efficiency. So that's on one scale. But I mentioned also, I was with Schneider Electric, probably one of the biggest players globally around.

the electrification, digitalization, AI, I mean, in a hundred countries. And they just launched this tool, it's called EcoStruxure Foresight. And what it does is in buildings, and so I know this is going to spread like crazy, but so in buildings, they now can take siloed data, right? Okay, here's the mechanical data, here's the electrical data, here's whatever, bring it together and they can surface insights that you can never see before. like for the lighting, for the heating and cooling, how do you control systems better? How do you, like the system will tell you,

You know what? The chiller is about to go out on like building, you know, floor 10 building B. Let's go do some predictive maintenance, some, some maintenance, the proactive maintenance, or let's run around it. They'll run the electricity around it. We can model out. you want to do that? Their system has already been shown to be able to cut energy by up to 50 % in some cases, 65 % in hotels, hospitals, massive, massive buildings. This stuff is rolling out, man. Like the future is here.

Some of it's going to be consumer choices that we make just because they're better choices. And some of it's going to be happening at a much larger level at the business to business level because it helps you run a better business. All of it is going to move us to a more energy efficient world. And that's really important because as we try to update and modernize the grid and we know that with AI and electrification, we're going to need more energy. Like energy efficiency is getting sexy. I don't know if it's ever been sexy, but it is like so fascinatingly cool what's happening today.

That's what gives me hope and that's the kind of information that we're trying to get out.

I think that's a good place to press the pause button.